Moodle 2.5 is out for a while, initially released on 14th May 2013. Eventually with 2 minor releases, new Moodle has fixed of many of known issues. In my line of work many users asks me if they should upgrade to Moodle 2.5 or continue on with 2.4. or older. Moodle 2.6 release is going to come up soon as I write this article. Moodle 2.5 brings some interesting new features for teachers, students and administrators. I will try to skim through some of these features, enhancements and changes in Moodle 2.5 You can find the full details of the new release at Moodle 2.5 Release notes.
New features
Badges
Badge is an interesting new addition to Moodle, which has been anticipated for a while now. The Mozilla Open Badges (Open Badge Infrastructure or OBI) project is a program by Mozilla that issues digital badges to recognize skills and achievements of individuals participating in various online learning programme. The badge structure allows one to display real-world achievements and skills which may help with future career and education opportunities. The OBI allows badge issuers and developers to build badges, and allows online learners to choose from a number of different pathways for development. New Moodle supports issuing badges to a student based on the users meeting various predefined criteria compatible with Mozilla Open Badges. Badges created in Moodle can be displayed on a user’s profile and/or published on their Open Badges backpack and public badge collections in their backpack will display in their Moodle profile. There are two categories of badges:
- Site badges – available to users site-wide and related to the site wide activities, like finishing a set of courses.
- Course badges – available to users enrolled in the course and related to the activities that happen inside the course.
Install add-ons from inside Moodle
Installing plugin used to be a manual process while the administrator had to download the plugin to the server and unzip it in to the plugin directory to make the plugin work. In new Moodle 2.5 It’s now possible to install an add-on/plugin from within Moodle administrative interface; useful for those admins who do not have FTP access. This screen is accessible when you, login as an admin and go to Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Install add-ons Alternatively, an add-on code may be deployed manually at the server like we used to do with the older version of Moodle.
Word count in forum posts
A new setting in forums will display the number of words in a post
Note word count bottom left
Search for enrolled users
A new Enrolled users search box makes finding users in very large courses much easier: 
A search facility allows teachers to search for specific users
New themes suited to all screen sizes
Bootstrap has been around for a while now and getting popular. Due to user demand Bootstrap as a base framework and now for Moodle. Moodles has a ‘base’ theme called “Bootstrapbase” that implements the basics, and a new usable theme called ‘Clean’ which extends it with some simple configuration options and also functions as a good template example. This can be used at it is or used for developing your own Bootstrap-based themes. It also (along with Afterburner theme) allows you to upload a logo directly from the file picker. The Bootstrap framework supports responsively reformat the layout according to the screensize of the device used. So it supports phone or tablet screens. 
Clean theme on standard screen
Clean theme on smaller screen
You can also add your own logo in to the new Moodle bootstrap theme.
Drag and drop media and text onto the course page
You can now drag an image or some text onto your course page and choose whether to display it embedded in a label or as a clickable resource. See the Label documentation for more information.
Drag and drop images to Moodle Course
Drag and drop text/ word doc content to Moodle course.
Templates for Essay question types
When using the Essay question type in a quiz, you can now set a template which appears in the students’ text editor for scaffolding their response:
What the student sees in a Eassy question types
Enhancement
Forms are much shorter
Moodle has a lot of settings and features, which all are displayed in a single page and the page becomes a scroll of death with all these options displayed in a from. New changes makes non-essential or less used settings on forms are collapsed by default, yet you can quickly access them when you need them.
Note the “expand all” option and condensed links
“Show more” and “show less” options
The rich text editor is collapsed and can be expanded:
Formatting options collapsed and box is narrow
Formatting options shown and box expanded
In a similar space-saver, you can choose whether or not to enable the rich text editor when creating quiz questions:
Without the editing tools
With the editing tools
Folders can be displayed inline on a course page
A folder allows a teacher to display several course resources together. The resources may be of different types and they may be uploaded in one go, as a zipped folder which is then unzipped, or they may be added one at a time to an empty folder on the course page.
You can now choose whether to have a folder show its contents in a separate screen, as previously, or to have it display them inline with any subfolders expanded:
Folder displayed inline with subfolders expanded
Assignment enhancements
Along with neater options for choosing submission and feedback types, resubmitting options are much improved. See Assignment settings for more information.
Neater assignment set up screen
New settings for re-submissions
Quickly “Jump to..” another section
If you’re using the ‘one section per page’ setting, you can now move to other sections from a drop down menu:
The ‘jump to’ drop down menu returns
Glossary block enhancements
You can now use a global glossary in the random glossary block, and you can display the entries in alphabetical order:
Entries will display in alphabetical order
Changes
Reports moved to the Administration block
Reports have moved and can now be seen in the newly named Administration block, (formerly Settings.)
Administration block with Reports
Read more on Moodle changes on previous version
Moodle changes across major upgrade 1.9 to 2.0 to 2.1 to 2.2 to 2.3 Moodle changes across 2.3 to 2.4 Moodle overview and feature lists 2.2 and 2.3Our team has many years of experience deploying Moodle for business organization and educational institutions.
We can help you with Moodle installation, configuration, upgrades, integration for central authentication and with other applications, training. We provide managed services on our deployed Moodle system with that includes proactive monitoring, technical support, update and upgrade, backup and recovery.
You may contact me directly for Moodle related services or visit http://xeois.com andhttp://globalsm.pw/
tag: moodle, upgrade, Moodle 2.4, Moodle 2.5, new features, changes, enhancements
reference:
http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/Category:New_features http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/New_features http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_2.5_release_notes
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